effectual working of the propaganda, for the crowd will be unable to digest or retain the material that is offered them. It will, moreover, weaken and hnally cancel its own effectiveness.
It was, for instance, fundamentally wrong to paint the enemy in a ridiculous light, as the Austrian and German comic papers made a point of doing in their propaganda ; wrong because, when the enemy was actually met with in the flesh, it was bound at once to produce on our men a totally different impression of him, which subsequently took its revenge in a most terrible manner ; for the German soldier, under the direct impression of the enemy’s power of resistance, now felt he had been deceived by the fabricators of his information up to that moment, and instead of strength¬ ening or at least conhrming his fighting keenness, it did the opposite. The men broke down under it.
On the other hand, the British and American war propaganda was psychologically correct. By display¬ ing the German to their own people as a barbarian and a Hun, they were preparing the individual soldier for the horrors of war, and so helped to spare him dis¬ appointments. The most terrible of the weapons which now came against him were now, for him, merely a confirmation of the information which he had already received and reinforced his faith in the truth of his Government’s assertions, whilst it heightened his rage and hatred against the villainous enemy.
Thus the British soldier never felt that the informa¬ tion he got from home was untrue, and this, alas ! was so much the case with the German, that he ended by rejecting all that came from that quarter as pure swindle and Krampf.
What, for instance, should we say about a poster advertising a new soap, if it described other soaps as being “good” ? We should shake our heads over it.